This Week in Context: Skyhook Speaks at MobileBeat 2015

For those companies serious about growing their businesses through mobile, MobileBeat was the place to be this week. With 2 billion smartphones worldwide today, users spend on average 3 hours per day on them (more than TV!), and the number of ways to reach them is expanding exponentially. Capitalizing on this is not always easy, and if you don’t, you risk missing big growth opportunities, or losing them to a competitor that acts faster.

This year, VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference set out to help business capitalize on these new growth opportunities, and discussed new customer acquisition strategies for an increasingly mobile world. Hyper personalization was also a big theme this year, as many sessions were dedicated to helping attendees to make users love them, and determine how to deliver exactly the right message at the right time.

Efforts to transform a business around mobile must first be preceded by a passion for the experience of the end user. #culture#MobileBeat

Skyhook’s VP of Marketing, Mike Schneider (Schneidermike), spoke on a panel with Mark Kirschner, CMO at eBay enterprise and Tara-Nicholle Nelson, VP of Marketing at MyFitnessPal. The panel assessed finding your “halo” moments, and the panelists spoke about how to delight customers at key moments. Here were some of the main points covered:

For apps, imagine delivering exactly the content your users need at exactly the moment they need it. Halo moments empower app owners to dramatically improve user engagement by anticipating users’ needs and intentions. This can also help apps bolster their direct advertising offering and strengthen offline brick and mortar partnerships - which gives apps the ability to deliver more targeted content, sending notifications to users when they visit offline partner locations.

For brands, the delivery of the most relevant content possible to these precise Persona segments results in a higher probability that users will engage - as it no longer feels like annoying advertising, but vital information that they want and need.

Don’t ship the product till you have got users excited about an “aha” moment #MobileBeat by @mmccue

#2 Staying Top of Mind in a Crowded App Landscape

Consumers are likely to get more selective, and so they’re looking for “instant gratification” from their loyalty and other app experiences. App and other mobile publishers need to generate “halo moments,” or positive experiences that generate strong brand affiliation with customers, and thus better results over time.

In-store modes that help users navigate retail stores or find their favorite items in stock are much more useful to users after they arrive at the retailer — and we are already seeing it happen in forward-looking apps today. The element of place will fundamentally change mobile app design for the better.

#3 Stress Value of Location in App Experience to Enable Appticipation

While there is some sensitivity around user location today, we believe enabling it will be an accepted reality in the future in order for people to be able to do what they want to do. How location is positioned today - in apps specifically - is very nebulous: they are using their app, then presented with what we call the “location screen of death”, in which they are asked to turn on location. More often than not, we don’t tend to turn location on in response to this screen. Unless the use of location is inherently obvious (like checking in on Yelp or Facebook, for example), we as users question why this app needs to know our location. It freaks people out.

But once apps get better about building up to the benefits that enabling location can do for the user - in the First Time User Experience, for example - we believe that users will better understand the value and the exchange of information will be more acceptable, tolerated, and expected to provide the best app experience possible.